‘The Talk’ usually means a discussion about sex and reproduction that parents are supposed to have with their children at some point. For black kids, though, ‘The Talk’ has a much heavier meaning: the discussion of racism and implicit bias, an explanation for why a black kid has to be much more careful than his white friend, and how to behave so as to reduce the dangerous tension in a situation involving authority figures such as police.
This is the talk that Darrin Bell refers to in his powerful graphic novel.
Vivid and graphic (sorry), it is beautifully drawn, but what makes it stand out is the powerful autobiographical content.
Darrin Bell, as per the book, is bi-racial, with a black father and a white Jewish mother. He is
a poor kid born in South Central, raised in East LA. I’m a nobody.
He has an older brother, Steven. Darrin _looked_ black, while Steven had more Caucasian features, which perhaps accounted for Steven’s willingness to overlook systematic racism.
Young Darrin’s first brush with racism was when he was about 5 (I’m guessing, from the images): he was playing with a bright green water pistol when a cop car pulled up.
In this period, Darrin’s father leaves the family, and so it falls to his mother to give him The Talk.
It is heartbreaking that some little kids in America have to get this talk, while others can take it for granted that authority figures will treat them fairly.
There are bullies in elementary school, and it is a relief when a few years later, he finds his people: a group of ethnically diverse, intellectually curious kids.
Future celebrities seem to lurk everywhere in LA, even elementary school. Bell is picked to play a drug dealer in a classroom exercise; he is deeply uncomfortable, but Mayim Bialik steps in to save him. (Bialik went on to get a neuroscience PhD and act in Big Bang Theory).
By high school, Bell has a strong voice and is writing opinion columns for the school paper. A column about metal detectors gets noticed by Senator Wilson, who calls to congratulate him.
I put some of myself into a 750-word column and powerful people — white people — were moved by it. They heard me. And they spoke to me with excitement — the way I’ve only seen white adults speak to white kids. They’re treating me as if I’m white. In other words, they’re treating me as if I’m human.
Bell’s college-admission essay is called ‘I Am”, and the first line is “I am not a “Black” American.” He gets into UC Berkeley in 1994, where he takes a job at the Zellerbach Hall auditorium to help pay his way. It is his first taste of power; backed by the UCB campus police, he gets to decide which kids without ID can enter. He also gets to watch the performances — Alvin Ailey, the Dalai Lama, Wynton Marsalis, and more.
Along the way, there are several other incidents which draw lines between him and fellow students who are white: he is called upon to provide opinions whenever Africa or race is mentioned, a cop asks him how he even got into Berkeley. It is startling when in famously liberal UC Berkeley, a white female professor accuses him of plagiarism, based on her assumption that he simply could not have written a paper as sophisticated as the one he turned in. But Bell has the last word, and it is perfect.
Years later, in 2020, Bell has to have The Talk with his own 6-year-old son.
The Talk joins, in my graphic-novel canon, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdel’s novels (along with the ever-fresh Doonesbury) which have as much to say as any pages of text.
Wow, sounds really good. Brought up so many pertinent issues of race and racism.